Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 1

This is topic Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 1 in forum Film Handlers' Movie Reviews at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Mark J. Marshall (Member # 1409) on 11-20-2011, 06:58 AM:

I'm not a huge Twilight fan, but I do go see the movies with a few of the women in my life. My wife read the books. She said this book was her least favorite by far. But she wanted to see the movie to finish what she started. My 15 year old cousin has been following along as well and has also read the books. She agrees that this is the worst of the books. Ditto for my sister-in-law. I have not read the books, but I do find the movies mildly interesting especially when the monsters start to fight each other. So the last movie was probably my favorite for that reason. Note that none of these movies rank anywhere on any list of favorites that I keep in my head. It's just that THAT movie ranked as my favorite Twilight movie. That's not saying much, but there it is.

This movie was painful to watch. I have to say it was my least favorite. I'm not sure if it's bad writing (my wife and sister-in-law both say "yes" to that one), or bad acting on Bella's part (again, everyone agrees on that one), or bad directing or what. The whole first 2/3 of the movie was so extraordinarily predictable they probably could have turned it into a five minute montage and no one would have felt like they missed anything. Then we could have wrapped this whole thing up with just one gloriously long movie. But I guess they wanted to take a page from the Harry Potter series and turn it into two parts. That was a mistake I think from a story telling perspective. It will make them more money I'm sure. But this series just does not have the density of narrative nor the depth of character arcs that Harry Potter has. Not even close. So two movies here seems wholly unnecessary.

I'm curious to know what others think. But I really didn't care all that much for this one at all.

Posted by Tony Gallimore (Member # 5358) on 11-26-2011, 04:22 PM:

I agree with you Mark... This installment was the worst of all. My thought was they just stuffed every shot they possibly could in, even though the acting was marginal, all to fill the time out for this episode and allow them to make the second and (they say) final installment. The wedding sequence drug so much I thought I was going to have to go buy one of those $4 cokes just so I could get up and stir a little, otherwise it might have put me to sleep waiting for the wolfpack to attack, which they finally did and livened things up a bit. I noticed several of the guys in the pack were actually given speaking parts this time, too. The vampires were a little stoic, we didn't see many fangs bared at all. I guess they were busy shuttling blood around for Bella. All in all it was somewhat of a let down for the guys, but there were several moments of utter delight (squeels and applause) for the younger ladies when Taylor Lautner took his shirt off (His trademark through the series) proving most everyone was indeed still awake... or maybe the screaming woke everyone up. Anyway, I guess we'll all have to wait until next November to really put this thing to bed.